The Microsoft Windows Azure cloud compute service was unavailable to many users in Europe for 2.5 hours on Thursday, starting at 11:09 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time. The cloud compute service in the West Europe region is provided by Azure servers in Microsoft’s Dublin, Ireland, data center and in an Amsterdam facility.

Azure storage services continued to be available and running workloads stayed up, regardless of whether users could access them or not, making the cause of loss of availability a different case from the Feb. 29 outage where a security certificate entered Azure’s infrastructure without the ability to recognize it was a unique leap year date.